Following DNA pathways in the weave of history: how science is influencing our historical narratives of who we are and where we are from.

If it seems as if there has been an avalanche of recent headlines revealing insights into the travails of our ancient ancestors, you’d be right.

From the fate of the people who built Stonehenge to the striking physical appearance of Cheddar Man, a 10,000-year-old Briton, the deluge of information has been overwhelming.

But this step change in the understanding of our past has been building for years now. It’s been driven by new techniques and technological advancements in the study of ancient DNA – genetic information retrieved from the skeletal remains of our long-dead kin.

At the forefront of this revolution is David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston Massachusetts….

Reich used his next-generation sequencing tech to power through genome after genome. To date, the lab has retrieved DNA from more than 900 ancient individuals.

The results are helping assemble new narratives for the peopling of our world. In some cases, the results have forced archaeologists and historians to re-visit some long-held ideas, sparking no small amount of debate and controversy.

Reich’s team has helped unravel the tangled web of migration and interbreeding that set down the present-day genetic landscape of Europe. Archaeologists had long suspected that the spread of farming out of the Near East and across Europe was a formative event in the continent’s prehistory.

Reich’s work helped confirm that this meeting of rather distantly related Near East farmers and indigenous hunter-gatherers had been crucial to the mix of ancestry that characterises Europeans, but his team added a third key ingredient to the melting pot.

In a paper published in the journal Genetics in 2012, Reich and his colleagues had spotted that Northern and Central Europeans appeared to have received genetic input from a population related to Native Americans.

Further evidence from ancient DNA would confirm that this distinctive genetic signature had entered Europe for the first time during a mass migration of people from the steppe, on Europe’s eastern periphery.